“An incubator for thinking about the problems and solutions of the packaging community for the next, let’s say, ten years, five years, 30 years.”
Python packaging has been a disaster for so long that it takes a new community initiative called WheelNext just to start talking about fixing it. The problems are real: PyPI file size limits choke on AI models, there’s no way to specify GPU or CPU features in wheel identifiers, and scientific packages all vendor their own copies of the same libraries. Six new PEPs and a proposed Packaging Council tell you everything about the scale of the mess they’re trying to clean up.